The barely legible handwriting projected on the facade of an old theater building, as seen on the cover of this book, demands an effort to be read. The most notable line translates as follows: ‘I have taken cyanide.’ We are looking at an enlarged suicide note. The two visual artists Femke Kempkes and Machteld Aardse used fragments of this letter, stored in the archives of the Jewish Historical Museum, for their installation Vaarwel/Last Words in 2013. They processed the handwritten note and projected it on the Hollandsche Schouwburg (Dutch Theater), a former theater in Amsterdam used for the registration and deportation of at least 46,000 Jews during the German occupation of the Netherlands (1940-1945). The letters on the facade provide only a glimpse of a human life in an extreme situation. They hardly represent the full complexity of its historical moment or give any explanation.

One might wonder how such a fragment leads to a greater understanding of the past. However, Holocaust memory, as all cultural memory, defies the logic of accumulative understanding, as if something was broken into shards that need to be pieced together. Instead, it is generative, produced in the present rather than retrieved from the past. Fragments of a traumatic past remain precisely that: fragmented and partial, part of an ever expanding and changing landscape of objects, sites and media that never leads to a complete and final understanding of the past.

The memory of the Holocaust has its own historiography. Soon after World War II, there was no coherent discourse concerning the persecution of the Jews in the Netherlands or abroad that resembles our current view. In the first decades, commemorations and memorials were key in shaping the memory of the war. In the Netherlands, the persecution and victimhood of Jews was overshadowed by narratives of national recuperation. In the young state of Israel, the image of the passive victim was outflanked by that of the active resister, more specifically the Warsaw Ghetto fighters. Only in the 1960s was the voice of Holocaust survivors heard, under the influence of the Eichmann trial, and appeared the first large-scale historical studies that dealt specifically with the persecution of the Jews.